Politics: Economics

This is going to be a bit of a rant, because there's a recurring theme in my recent social media that's really bugging me, and I need to vent. I'm going to do it as a blog post rather than an early-morning tweetstorm, because tweets are more likely to be pulled out of context, and then I'm going to unfollow basically everybody that isn't a weird Twitter bot or a band that I like, and try to avoid politics until the end of the year. Also, I'll do some physics stuff.
This morning saw the umpteenth reshared tweetstorm (no link because it doesn't matter who it was) berating people who write about…

Over in Twitter-land, somebody linked to this piece promoting open-access publishing, excerpting this bit:
One suggestion: Ban the CV from the grant review process. Rank the projects based on the ideas and ability to carry out the research rather than whether someone has published in Nature, Cell or Science. This could in turn remove the pressure to publish in big journals. I’ve often wondered how much of this could actually be drilled down to sheer laziness on the part of scientists perusing the literature and reviewing grants – “Which journals should I scan for recent papers? Just the big…

Probably the dumbest person I've ever met in my life was a housemate in grad school. I didn't do my lab work on campus, so I wasn't living in a neighborhood where cheap housing was rented to students, but in a place where folks were either genuinely poor, or in the market for very temporary lodgings while they looked for something better. There were low-income housing units across the street, and also an apartment building full of families who didn't quite qualify for welfare.
This particular guy rented one of the other rooms in the house, and worked a series of unskilled jobs-- assistant on…

The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a "social incentive" (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100 Amazon gift card for meeting a 4-week deadline) worked to increase the chance of a referee accepting a review request, and improved the chances that they would meet the deadline. The effect of cash was a little smaller for tenured faculty, but they were slightly more susceptible to the…

Lance Mannion has a really nice contrast between childhood now and back in the 1970's that doesn't go in the usual decline-of-society direction. He grew up not too far from where I now live, and after describing his free-ranging youth, points out some of the key factors distinguishing it from today, that need to be accounted for before lamenting the lack of kids running around outside:
-- A lot of the houses in "the old neighborhood" are still owned by the people who owned them back in the day, so the only kids around are visiting grandkids,
-- Those homes that are occupied by families with…

Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week in the physics blogosphere, a pair of interviews with a BICEP2 researcher and a prominent skeptic. This, in turn, led to a lot of very predictable criticism of the BICEP2 team for over-hyping their results, and a bunch of social-media handwringing about how the…

I'm not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let's talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food stamp cookbook and the latter with a magazine story about Clay County, KY, spinning off a statistical study of the hardest places to live in the US.
The Vox piece is mostly on poverty in general, and how there's more to the bad diets of poor people than just lack of money--…

While I'm complaining about statisticulation in social media, I was puzzled by the graph in Kevin Drum's recent post about college wage gaps, which is reproduced as the "featured image" above, and also copied below for those reading via RSS. I don't dispute the general phenomenon this is describing-- that the top 10% of college grads earn way more than the average, and the bottom 10% way less, and somewhat less than high school grads-- but I'm baffled about what was done to generate this graph.
Specifically, I'm puzzled by the vertical axis, which is labeled "Real hourly wage (natural log)."…

Kevin Drum and Aaron Carroll report on a new study of the effect of new grocery stores opening in "food deserts" in poor neighborhood. The study is paywalled, so I can't speak to the whole thing, but both of them quote similar bits making the same point: no statistically significant effects on the BMI of people in the neighborhood, and very few signs of healthier eating in general.
This is one of those studies that probably belongs in the Journal of "Well, Yeah...", because it doesn't surprise me a bit. Not for reasons that can be addressed via policy measures-- Drum quotes the study saying "…

The local sports-talk radio station is running a bunch of commercials from a tax prep service in which a loud announcer declares that "People who did their own taxes left one billion dollars on the table last year. That's billion with a 'b.'" and urges people to "Get your billion back!" by paying for their tax-return service. Which, you know, sounds like quite a bit.
Only, there are upwards of 300 million people in the US. So, a billion dollars is about $3 per person. So, it's maybe not as impressive as they want you to think.
Of course, a lot of those people are too young or too old to be…

About five minutes into my class Wednesday, my cell phone rang. I silenced it right away, but recognized the number as the kids' day care. And I knew right away what it was: The Pip has had a bit of a cough for a while, and wasn't all that happy that morning. Sure enough, when I got back to my office there was a series of emails waiting for me between Kate and the director of the JCC pre-school program, about how The Pip was just feverish enough to need to be sent home.
Wednesday was a particularly inauspicious day for this, as Kate had a court argument in Rochester on Thursday, and I have a…

We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate's mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out of driving around in a rental car-- The Pip chattered happily about "My new car" for a while-- which we did a lot of, going to a beach and the Mote Aquarium in Sarasota.
Doing all that driving in a rented SUV and a state with a 70mph speed limit got me thinking about optimum driving speed. Particularly on the…

In a comment to yesterday's post about the liberal arts, Eric Lund makes a good point:
The best argument I have ever heard for doing scholarship in literature and other such fields is that some people find it fun.
I single this out as a good point not because I want to sneer at the literary disciplines, but because with a little re-wording, this could apply to just about anything. The best reason for studying any academic subject is because it's fun.
This is, as I alluded to in a later comment of my own, a significant source of tension for Delbanco's book and a lot of other arguments about…

Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that "numbers guy" Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I'll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn't the only one to take, just the latest in a series) is more annoying than entertaining.
You would think that the 2008 economic meltdown, in which the financial industry broke the entire world when they were blindsided by the fact that housing prices can go down as well as up,…

A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on "The Crisis of Big Science," looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It's somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including a good deal of bitterness over the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider almost twenty years ago. This isn't particularly new for Weinberg-- back at the APS's Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999, he gave a big lecture where he spent a bunch of time fulminating…

The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges, and three of the six companies involved have agreed to a settlement that will change the way their books get priced. A couple of the publishers, particularly Macmillan, whose nasty public spat with Amazon kicked this whole thing off, have decided to fight…

In comments to Friday's snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but I sprained my ankle playing basketball at lunch, which kind of blew a hole in my afternoon...
Looking at her posts, though, it's hard to really engage with her critique, because there's next to nothing there to engage with. In the most recent post, the closest thing to a…

On last month's post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes:
In fact, there were a lot of readers who responded to the posts saying exactly what Roach suggested: He's been out of school too long. Others questioned why a successful businessman couldn't pass 10th-grade math. (I looked at FCAT 10th-grade questions and couldn't do them myself, but math has always…

The new school year is upon us, so there's been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I've been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of people have been referring to a "Student Loan Bubble," such as Dean Dad, who points to this graph from Daniel Indiviglio as an illustration:
That post is a week old, which is a hundred years in blog time, and I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because it's a terrible graph. Indiviglio says:
This chart looks like a mistake, but it…

Back at the AAAS Meeting, I was really annoyed by a session on fracking, the process by which natural gas is extracted from shale deep underground. As I wrote at the time, regarding the industry shills who spoke:
I left before the whole thing had wrapped up, because it was that or start throwing stuff at Martin and Gorody. Honestly, their presentations made me more convinced than ever that we need strict regulations governing the development of the shale. While the gas will inevitably be extracted (unless somebody comes up with a cheap and readily manufactured solar cell with 60% efficiency…

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